THE NEXUS: THE PLACE OF BECOMING WHO WE ARE

We need friends in order to know anything--even ourselves.   ~CS Lewis

For the last few months—in preparation for a class that I’ve been teaching—I’ve been in the company of two good friends: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Although I am an admirer of both of these writers, the friendship I am referring to is between them. The story of how these two bookish Oxford professors produced some of the best-selling titles of the twentieth century (“The Narnian Chronicles” and “The Lord of the Rings,” among others) is a fascinating account of intellect, faith, and loss; but it is most interestingly a story of friendship. Tolkien and Lewis contributed to each other’s work not by writing together—each was far too much an individual genius—but by listening, supporting, goading, and even criticizing. In Lewis’ phrase, they “acted as midwives” in the process of bringing one another’s books to completion. They were friends.

Lewis and Tolkien, both combat veterans of World War I, met as new faculty members at an Oxford garden party in 1921, and remained friends until Lewis’ death in 1963. Of course a friendship of four decades is not going to be one long garden party, and their association had its share of tensions, jealousies, and disappointments. But through it all, they considered each other to be brothers in the faith, and they gratefully acknowledged what their friendship had contributed to making each the writer—and the person—he had come to be.

It’s impossible to determine what Lewis’s Narnia would have been like without Tolkien’s influence, and whether Tolkien would have quit dithering with the Silmarillion and gotten on with finishing The Lord of The Rings without Lewis’s prodding. Yet it’s no exaggeration to say that the literary works that flowed from their pens was, at least to some degree, a product of their friendship as well as their individual talent.

This is not an exercise in sentimentalizing friendship—as though Tolkien and Lewis had pledged that they were BFFs—but I see their relationship as a laboratory example of a profound element of reality: What the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls the “nexus.” In Whitehead’s “process” approach to philosophy the fundamental basis of everything—in the microcosm and the macrocosm, the atom and the galaxy, the material and the relational—is not the individual entity (to use a favorite Whitehead term), but the evolving relationship between entities.  Essence, then, is not located in “being,” but “becoming.” And the ever-emerging realities-of-the moment are connected not by a static link, but at an ever-changing point between what has been and what will be: the nexus. (Just try to pin that nexus down!) In fact, an “entity” itself becomes what it is at any given moment only as a stage in a continual process of change. This all sounds very deep, but it is easily illustrated by the difference between King Midas’ living daughter and a golden statue, between a person and a corpse. “Life is change,” the old adage truly says. When the “becoming” stops, so does the “being.”

This is readily seen in the slow-motion video of a caterpillar-becoming-a-butterfly, or the fascinating spring growth of a tree. But, although it is not so “material,” the constant-becoming of a relationship is no less real: Here is C.S. Lewis, and here is J.R.R. Tolkien, and here—at the nexus—is the friendship.  If the friendship were an aspect only of one or the other of them, it would not be a friendship. It is a life-force that flows between them, no less real than the corporeal being each of them is. Of course the joy of this—and the potential sorrow—is that, like all nexuses, it is not only always changing. It is “change” itself.

Beyond Lewis and Tolkien and the nexus-geyser out of which sprang their delightful books, I have been thinking about other historical friendships which have become historical precisely because their accomplishments are, in fact, products not of one or the other of them, but of whatever that life-force is between them. Let’s call it their nexus: Lewis and Clark, the Wright brothers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (I know it is a subtle difference, but I am not speaking of two people who get together to work on a project--rather of something that comes about because of a living connection.) C.S. Lewis describes the genesis of friendship as that moment when one says to the other, “What? You, too? I thought I was the only one…,” and the two new friends open together the doors of their isolation; the doors open onto a new place.

One of the deepest locations of finding reality at the place-of-coming-together is marriage. Studies in marriage therapy show that members of relatively healthy couples use the word “we” a lot; an emphasis on “I” when describing what one wants in a relationship is a red flag. One well-respected marriage counselor notes that—when they argue—members of happy marriages are concerned about the marriage (and their partner) and not just “winning the fight.” As one of my teachers liked to put it, “I may win the argument, but I may lose you!” Marriages (and friendships) die when “we” becomes “I” and the nexus is severed as viscerally as Solomon’s proposed dissecting of that baby; or when one or the other tries to freeze in place that life-force that must, in order to live, continue to grow and change.

Love is both formed and sustained at the nexus. In a marriage, each one pours himself, herself, into this living space, and pours him or herself out for the sake of the other. Rather than being consumed in the process, each is constantly renewed as the nexus is constantly reborn. The result is not a cut-out valentine heart pinned to the wall, but: “home,” “family,” “daily life,” “forgiveness”—a place of safety and welcome not just for these two, but for “all who enter here.” In a wedding sermon, written from prison to a young couple, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Up till now, it is your love that has made the marriage; from now on it is the marriage that will sustain your love.” The nexus.

__________________________________________________________________________
At the request of a few friends, I will write a more complete account of the relationship and work of Lewis, Tolkien, and "the Inklings" in a future post.

Although "infinity" or "eternity" is beyond our ability to grasp, some approaches to cosmology posit that the universe itself may be infinite, and always changing--always "becoming." Whitehead suggests that "god" is eternally changeless and eternally open to change. I explored these mysteries in this meditation.

Alfred North Whitehead

JRR Tolkien

C.S. Lewis

THORDIS AND VI: THE CHURCH

In 1958, my sixth grade Sunday School class at American Lutheran Church in Huron, South Dakota was comprised of an unfortunate number of cutups—me among them. One fateful Sunday morning we were in the process of achieving new levels of hilarious misbehavior when our teacher stood up and walked out. And never came back. Ever.

In the immediate aftermath of her departure we got quiet, and, stifling giggles, stared ominously across the teacherless table at one another. And then the door opened, and in walked Thordis Bultena—the Sunday School Superintendent. Our heads bowed in repentant expectation; the giggling stopped. Mrs. Bultena was one of those teachers who actually seemed to deserve—not demand—our respect. She was kind of a combination of Saturday Night Live’s “Church Lady” and the mom in “Leave It To Beaver.” She was no nonsense, but she was so darn loving. And the main reason for the bowing of one of those heads that morning was that she was my mom’s best friend. Uh-oh.

I don’t remember if Thordis (who remained with our class for the rest of the year) told my mom about the incident; I don’t think she did. I do however, trace my growing admiration for Thordis as a woman of faith and of the church from that time on, no doubt because I also came to an understated but deep realization that she cared about me. My baptism had been a quasi-emegency, and I never got to know the neighbors my parents had recruited to be my on-the-spot godparents. Thordis and John, I now realize, were my real godparents.

Mom and Dad and Thordis and John (about whom I’ve written here) were often together in those casual church potluck and backyard picnic table sort of events; they had the kind of friendship that could be measured in gallons of coffee (and—for John and my dad—the very occasional Hamms beer). And in what was a coincidence of employment-triggered mobility, both of our families moved from Huron to Rapid City within a year or so of each other, and became, as before, members of the same church. Often, on my visits home from college, and, later, seminary, Mom would say, “You should go over and say hi to John and Thordis.” Which I was happy to do. Of course we had coffee.

Then came the day, not long after my dad had died, I was visiting my mom—now alone in that Rapid City house, just down the hill from South Canyon Lutheran Church where my dad’s funeral had been held. I asked her how she was doing, and my mom—a lifelong woman of the church—said, a bit downcast, “I’m not sure how much faith I have right now.” And then she brightened just a bit and said, “But Thordis has enough faith for both of us.”

That’s the Church. Thordis and Vi: The Church.

"FUN, FAST AND FURIOUS:" C.S. LEWIS, J.R.R. TOLKIEN AND THE GOOD LIFE

 I have come that you might have life – and have it in all abundance. ~Jesus, in John 10:10

C.S. Lewis

In preparation for a community ed class that I presented recently, I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks with C.S. Lewis* and his chums – a group who playfully dubbed themselves “The Inklings.” I intend to mine a lot of blog gold (or at least ore) out of the riches I have been exposed to in their

fascinating company (and writings),

J.R.R. Tolkien

but for now I want to make this observation: These men had a good and simple life; perhaps good in large part to the degree that it was simple.

By “good” I certainly don’t mean that their lives--or their life together--were free of pain or discord. Both Lewis and his closest friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, saw action in World War I, Lewis being badly wounded; and their friendship—intimate for decades—cooled in later years (although they remained mutually admiring and respectful of one another).

And, although they were all Christians, I am not speaking of a narrowly pious approach to being “good.” They loved their beer, and one of them, Lewis’s brother, Warnie, was probably an alcoholic. Lewis’s affection for the pipe and pint gave many American evangelical Christians—now among his most devoted fans—cause for some skepticism about the genuineness of the faith of this eccentric disciple from across the Atlantic. (And it was Tolkien’s conservative Roman Catholicism—and a doctrinaire opposition to divorce—that challenged his friendship with C.S. Lewis upon Lewis’s late-in-life marriage to an American divorcee.)

I have listed what I don’t mean – let me suggest what I do mean: That sense of a life of fulfillment and abundance that is the product of loving relationships, meaningful purpose, and mental challenge (perhaps even in that order). “The good life.”

Dozens of colleagues and participants came and went to and from meetings of the Inklings over the years – it was not an exclusive circle. The chief and most lasting among them, however, were C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and Warnie Lewis. Our mind’s eye can see them--all together, or a couple of them over pints of ale or cups of tea--deep in conversation or light-hearted in laughter. In one way or another, their friendship(s) had come about as a result of the kind of epiphany that C.S. Lewis describes in The Four Loves: “Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself...."** Friendship for Lewis is very much a meeting of the heart and the mind in equal proportion.  “We need friends to know anything,” says Lewis, “even ourselves.”

Heart, yes – and mind. Something to talk about. Something that means something. Ideas. The heart and the mind come together in Lewis’s joyous description of an Inklings meeting: “When Warnie, Tollers (Tolkien), Williams and I meet for our pint in a pub in Broad Street, the fun is often so fast and furious that the company probably thinks we’re talking bawdy when in fact we’re very likely talking theology!”

These men were, of course, “intellectuals.” I have sometimes puzzled over the definition of that term, and have come to the conclusion that an intellectual is anyone who cares about ideas and the words or images that carry them. One doesn’t need a Ph.D. for that, and neither does it mean that an intellectual is pigeonholed as a dour academic. The Inklings certainly breathed the rarified air of Oxford (although Warnie Lewis was a professional soldier who became, on his own, an expert in matters of French royal history, and Charles Williams was educated at what amounts to a community college and was largely self-taught – before landing an Oxford lectureship), but they weren’t parsing the fine-points of the present participle over pints at the Lamb & Flag (not that there would have been anything wrong with that)—they were talking, and laughing, and interrupting one another over what matters in life; how could one believe this or that to be true, and occasionally listening to Tollers read out a few of the new pages from his latest “hobbit book” (The Lord of the Rings). Until one of them would say, “All right, enough – enough hobbits for now. Landlord, another round!”

(I am reminded of a comment once made by someone regarding a weekly discussion group I attend: “Whoever takes a breath is the listener.”)

I used the word “simple” in the first paragraph, and I suppose I mean that in a comparative sense. What I mean is that they had their books and pens and pipes and the round table and their cups of tea and pints of ale and walks along the banks of the Thames and one another. What they didn’t have (here’s the comparative part) is cars (for the most part), television, the internet, smartphones, screens, and other iDevices. This is not an anti-device rant. I like—maybe even love—my techno-things, and value what they do for me. But perhaps a part of me is just a little envious of an environment that was a bit simpler even though these were far from “simple” people. (One might consider the list of gadgets, above, another way: What contribution do these things make to “the good life?”)

I mentioned in passing that C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and the Inklings were all Christian (even then, a kind of dying breed in academic Oxford). This fact—perhaps ironically—was not a part of my inspiration for this essay. However, it would now (it seems) be disingenuous of me to imply that their shared faith had no part to play in their friendship or the fullness of life they discovered in their relationships and their conversation and their life together. Oxford may have been the air they breathed, but Christianity was the atmosphere in which they breathed it. The richness of life they found in the community of one another was an extension of each of them—in Lewis’s phrase—having “handed over your whole self to Christ.” As he concludes in Mere Christianity, “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”
______________________________________________________
* For those who say, "C.S. Who???" A primer: C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, born in Belfast in 1898, entered his adult life as a confirmed atheist. By the time he died in 1963—a highly revered professor of English Literature at Oxford and Cambridge and an internationally acclaimed author of Mere Christianity and the classic Narnia children’s series—he had become one of the most influential proponents of Christianity of the twentieth century. Fellow-professor J.R.R. Tolkien was a significant light in Lewis’s journey from atheism to faith. 

**Yes, "Man." Although Lewis can be excused for being a product of his times, his writings do reveal, it must be acknowledged, a streak of masculine-centered sexism.

Good Books: C.S. Lewis: A Life, by Alister McGrath; The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter

The Lamb & Flag and The Eagle and Child (The Bird and Baby), two of the Inklings' favorite pubs. They stand across from each other on St. Giles Street, Oxford.

"FOUNTAIN OF SORROW, FOUNTAIN OF LIGHT:" TWO REFLECTIONS

I. Fountain of Sorrow

“What have we gained and what have we lost?” is an apt analysis of the effects of the (literally) amazing technologies introduced in our day – and of the products of technological evolution and revolution throughout history. (A sonnet by the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas describes the labor-saving productivity of the newly-introduced tractor while lamenting how the roar of its motor shuts out the melody of the birds singing from the trees at the edge of the field, “bills wide in vain.”)

This gain-loss paradox occurred to me recently when a friend e-mailed regarding the new “Auto Awesome” photo enhancement app from Google. Auto Awesome apparently relieves the exhausted photographer of the task of rifling through all his photos, and digitally (instantly) produces a montage of pictures in which (for example) everyone is smiling.

Another friend commented that such a technology could well lead to a “brave new world in which everyone is smiling in every photo.” And, he added, “Jackson Browne could never have written the first verse to ‘Fountain of Sorrow’ in such a world.”

Here’s that verse:

Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer,
I was taken by a photograph of you.
There were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more,
But they didn't show your spirit quite as true:

You were turning 'round to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise;
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you,
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes.

I almost wept at this reading. Okay, I did weep. For one thing, “Fountain of Sorrow” has long been a favorite song, by the organically poetic Jackson Browne; for another, my friend spoke the lamentable truth: A “trace of sorrow” in a photographic image would be so easily edited out by the digital wonders of “Auto Awesome.”

What have we gained? And what have we lost?


II. Fountain of Light

Here’s a “gain:” E-mail. My friends Jeff and Warren and I—a friendship that reaches back fifty years—have an ongoing e-mail conversation. Sometimes we’ll go a week or two without picking up the thread, but no longer. The main reason I think e-mail is a gain is that I have come to believe that it actually allows for more depth and intimacy than a phone call. (Two exceptions: 1] Of course two lovers may find a ninety-minute phone call – spanning the miles that separate them – to be more intimate than e-mail. 2] E-mail has it’s dangers, especially when used to vent disagreements that are better talked out in person.)

In fact, it was in one of these e-conversations that Warren introduced us to Google’s Auto Awesome technology (see above), and Jeff replied with the reference to Jackson Browne. (My contribution was to steal their observations for this blog post.)

Our exchange caused me to visit again the whole of “Fountain of Sorrow,” a song I have never tired of. (The Canadians think that Leonard Cohen should win the Nobel Prize for poetry—and, what the heck, he’d have my vote; Jackson Browne is in the same league, that is, not a serious contender for a literary poetry prize, but a sublime creator of words and music with real meaning—real heart.)

But my favorite lines in “Fountain of Sorrow”—lines that I have felt deeply about since I heard them forty years ago—are not the profoundly revealing opening lines to which Jeff referred, but these, the very last lines of the song:

You could be laughing at me, you've got the right,
But you go on smiling so clear and so bright.

These lines have always spoken to me of friendship, love, acceptance—even gospel. They are indicative of what I receive from those who love me. (Remember, friends, the people who really love you do so in spite of who you are as much as because of who you are.) They could laugh – they smile.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, Warren and Jeff laugh at me plenty—in e-mail and in person. But, boy, do they smile. It’s what makes our ongoing e-mail—for me—a “fountain of light.”

_________________________________________________________________________
Here’s the song: Jackson Browne on “Austin City Limits.”